Pandagon is daily opinion blog covering feminism, politics, and pop culture. Come for the politics, stay for the complete lack of patience for the B.S. and bad faith coming from conservative leaders and pundits.

This Summer’s Reasons To Avoid Townhalls

Remember a year ago, when the world was simpler? Children were younger, the air was fresher, morons were out in your local VA hall screaming their fucking heads off about how the President was going to inject them with AIDS just so that they would have to get off their Medicare and buy insurance to cure it.

Adam Serwer has the rundown of it, but the short version is this: the section of the Voting Rights Act under which three black men and the organization to which they belonged is Section 11(b). The main problem with the prosecution’s case in this instance is that it would have been incredibly difficult to successfully prosecute the New Black Panther Party as a group (because the whole group wasn’t there and nobody else did anything else), which essentially means that the DOJ would be left trying to prove systematic voter intimidation based on the actions of two guys.

To parallel this, imagine that you tried to prosecute the Republican Party for voter caging…but the entirety of their congnizable efforts was two guys at a single polling place making nasty comments for a half hour. It’s not that those men weren’t trying to suppress the vote. It’s that they did such a shitty, disorganized job of it, and did so little, that pressing a claim against them would be fruitless.

Alas, we’re dealing with the modern Tea Party, which has basically decided that it’s the modern heir of the civil rights movement, and so they have deigned to follow Martin Luther King’s example of showing up in a public forum and yelling half-coherent sentences at people who have actual shit to deal with. Look forward to a summer of white people dressed up like Angela Davis, threatening to take down the hegemony of black power that’s ruining their lives and making the drive-through at Taco Bell so inefficient.

About the Author

Jesse Taylor is an attorney and blogger from the great state of Ohio. He founded Pandagon in July, 2002, and has also served on the campaign and in the administration of former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. He focuses on politics, race, law and pop culture, as well as the odd personal digression when the mood strikes.